This invention relates to an apparatus detecting a vehicle path along which a vehicle, such as a riderless vehicle, is traveling.
For example, Japanese Patent Kokai No. 63-142478 discloses a conventional vehicle path detecting apparatus employing a television camera for inputting an image of a road scene presented in front of a vehicle. The inputted image is processed to extract candidate points for pixels forming white straight lines. A Hough conversion is applied for the extracted candidates to detect straight lines representing the respective white straight lines. In order to increase the accuracy with which the white straight lines are detected, the edge points directed in the vertical direction are removed from the candidate points.
With such a conventional apparatus, however, it takes much time to detect the vehicle path since the Hough conversion is made for all of the candidate points. Furthermore, it is impossible to detect the road sides which are not defined by white lines and also to measure the degree of curvature of the road.